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Videos, New Zealand, Internet Filtering, & Other Stuff

I don’t really have a meaningful introduction for this post. I think the end of the quarter blahs have taken over. Here are the random thoughts for Friday.

Anyone who has spent any time talking with me knows I’m a fan of New Zealand. First country to give women the right to vote, it is nuclear-free, and has the most amazing speciation of birds because of the lack of mammals–what’s not to love?

I’ll tell you what isn’t to love about NZ, this: New Zealand’s internet filter goes live. Filtering Internet is such a slippery slope, as we’ve seen by the various fights over the years in the United States over filtering the Internet at public libraries. And even if the reason behind the filtering seems sound, we have seen the data that filtering doesn’t work. It doesn’t filter out what it is supposed to and filters out other websites that it shouldn’t. Obviously I’m against filtering the Internet and I’ll be interested to see how the library and archives community in NZ responds.

In other New Zealand news, here are a couple of articles about the plan to combine the National Library and Archives New Zealand under the Department of Internal Affairs: If it’s not broken then don’t fix it and Archives, Library merger turning back the clock. This is a bad idea. It certainly threatens the autonomy of the archives and the transparency that the archives is responsible for in terms of collecting and providing access to public records. Archives and libraries need autonomy in order to function effectively. Hopefully the outcry against these proposed mergers will stop it.